For a Better Mind, Body and Life

New and Improved Milk

The Problem

Milk consumption is at a 30-year low, and the dairy industry — like any industry — wants to boost sales. They’d like to experiment with their products in order to make them more appealing to their customers.

Big dairy has found themselves in a situation where they must figure out ways to better compete with other beverage processors for marketshare. Even after skimming all of the fat from milk, there are still enough carbs and proteins to produce about 80 calories per cup. And when they add artificial chocolate and strawberry flavorings — the most popular kinds of milk with children — the calorie count zooms up even further.

This leaves some nutritionists, parents and school administrators shaking their heads — and turning to lower calorie options. Oh, the dilemma! Let’s talk about why this is a farce…

Proposed Solution

The dairy industry’s big idea is to start addingaspartameto the milk that it sells to schools. You know this stuff by its brand names: NutraSweetTM, EqualTM. Their logic is simply to make milk sweeter without adding calories, so more kids will prefer milk products while adults can feel better about purchasing them, because they are lower in calories.

For better or worse, the FDA regulates the claims, labeling, and processing of most foods. Thus, the Dairy Industry has filed a petition for a rule-change that would redefine ‘milk.’

They still want to call their products just plain-old MILK, even if they add aspartame. To be clear, they are not trying to change the regulations that govern the back of the carton. The ingredients list would still note aspartame under the proposed rule changes. Because of this, Greg Miller of the National Dairy Council says,

We are not trying to be sneaky.

They merely want the aspartame containing milk to look identical to non-aspartame containing milk on the front. This way, if a carton of artificially sweetened milk was to be placed right next to pure milk with nothing added, say on a store shelf, there would be no detectable difference. That’s not sneaky at all. Bravo!

Business, Health, and Informed Human Beings

Milk is competing with sodas, artificially sweetened sports drinks, juices and other beverages that are more easily engineered to fit the nutrition guidelines du jourand to fit the flavor profiles that kids want. In a sense they are attempting to level the playing field. The real-life problem is that this real-life playing field IS NOT located in real-life anymore.

We’ve veered so far off course that reality is nearly impossible to grasp.

“You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into… the Twilight Zone.” — Rod Serling

Now, if you’re wondering whether aspartame is safe, consider this:

FDA officials describe aspartame as “one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved” and its safety as “clear cut”. The weight of existing scientific evidence indicates that aspartame is safe as a non-nutritive sweetener. — Wikipedia

OK, fine. Even if we accept that at face value, we’re still left with homogenized, pasteurized, de-fattened liquid with non-nutritive, artificial sweetener added. How much health-promoting nourishment can survive that process? We haven’t even talked about what’s in the strawberry flavoring yet. And we will feed this to our children, all in the name of cutting some calories?

The childhood obesity problem is systemically related to our culture and values, commerce and industrialized convenience foods, education, psychological health, environmental toxins, lives that require much less physical activity, etc. Sure calories are part of it…but in this context, calories are merely a distraction from the much bigger, essential problems.

The only problem the dairy industry is really trying to solve is that of slumping milk sales, not the unhealthy kids our world is producing. They are hoping that we’ll buy into the story that what’s good for boosting their sales also coincidentally happens to be good for kids. Let me ask you this: What if their idea works so will that kids start drinkingtoo much milk? Too many calories or whatever? Do you think they would try to dial back sales? Never.

So, we’re supposed to believe this a win-win, just like removing removing all, if not most, of the the fat from milk. This way, kids consume less fat and the dairy industry can market their products better to decision makers. Of course, this also enables the dairy industry to sell the milk fat right back to us in the form of expensive butter and cream. See what they did there?

It’s too bad that people aren’t used to starting with a default position that human beings aren’t broken. In that world, the default position for milk is the same: it’s not broken.

“We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but [one that] won’t be able to think.” ― Rod Serling

The bottom line, as always, is that we do have the power to vote with our dollars. If, like me, you have no reason to believe that milk is broken, nor that it needs to be fixed via industrial processes and additives, consider checking out a local dairy (US • UK). There, you’ll find real (raw) milk, animals that are better-treated, and dairymen and women who actually care about their end products. I encourage you to support them with your business, as I do.

We certainly have the ability to stay informed and apply pressure, too. Here’s an online petition you can sign:

Hyper-sweet additives like aspartame rewire children’s brains so that they always want sugary foods, turning the kids into tiny consumption machines. This constant craving fattens up the food companies’ bottom lines as it fattens up their customers, leading to our current obesity epidemic.

Tell the FDA to say no to hyper-sweeteners in healthy food. Stop aspartame from entering our milk.

What do you think, friends? Good move, bad move, unavoidable? Some would say the dairy industry is taking the pragmatic approach, and to think we can do better is wishful thinking. Is it? You might also want to share this article using the links below to help expose some of the people in your circles to real-food issues. It’s a good ball to get rolling!

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